One way to evaluate the UM diet, especially if your energy is low.
Dont feel guilty. Get curious.
I am not a physican or medical professional, but have found this useful as an athletic person.
If feelng low energy, evaluate your UM diet using a method that has solid science behind it. You may, just perhaps be tired because you are not eating enough carbohydrate to keep sufficient glycogen in your muscles.
Athletes know about this. They call it bonking. Its why runners may have a sudden plung in energy and come undone.
Sugar is everywhere. Grapes do have sugar in them. Fortunately they are of a relatively low glycemic index.
If anyone wants to assess the Glycemic Index and Glycemic load of foods recommended in UM, go this website and others that give information about glycemic index.
Note: If one is consuming ONLY low glycemic index carbs, that is not necessarily a good thing. One will lack energy for sprinting, running, lifting loads. When I took too little carbohydrate, I could not maintain aerobic workouts (heart health) and found that I could only bicycle or walk on flats or downhills. Too little carbohydrate left me helpless when trying to walk or climb up hills or stairs. One just drags and loses vitality.
Too much sugar is not good, too little is not good, either.
One can look at various foodstuffs favored in the UM diet and see how they rate.
And much of this Glycemic Index work is a gift to us by the physicians and research scientists at the University of Sydney and their colleagues in Canada. Thanks, ANZACs.
High GI foods if eaten alone with produce a more rapid surge in blood glucose than low glycemic index.
Glycemic load is how much of a foodstuff one is eating.
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Revised International Table of Glycemic Index (GI) and Glycemic Load (GL) Values—2008
By David Mendosa
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This is the definitive table for both the glycemic index and the glycemic load. I am able to reproduce it here courtesy of the author, Professor Jennie Brand-Miller of the University of Sydney. It is based on a table in different format but no more foods published December 2008 in Diabetes Care. However, only the abstract is free online there.
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The glycemic index (GI) is a numerical system of measuring how much of a rise in circulating blood sugar a carbohydrate triggers–the higher the number, the greater the blood sugar response. So a low GI food will cause a small rise, while a high GI food will trigger a dramatic spike. A list of carbohydrates with their glycemic values is shown below. A GI of 70 or more is high, a GI of 56 to 69 inclusive is medium, and a GI of 55 or less is low.
The glycemic load (GL) is a relatively new way to assess the impact of carbohydrate consumption that takes the glycemic index into account, but gives a fuller picture than does glycemic index alone. A GI value tells you only how rapidly a particular carbohydrate turns into sugar. It doesn't tell you how much of that carbohydrate is in a serving of a particular food. You need to know both things to understand a food's effect on blood sugar. That is where glycemic load comes in. The carbohydrate in watermelon, for example, has a high GI. But there isn't a lot of it, so watermelon's glycemic load is relatively low. A GL of 20 or more is high, a GL of 11 to 19 inclusive is medium, and a GL of 10 or less is low.
Foods that have a low GL almost always have a low GI. Foods with an intermediate or high GL range from very low to very high GI.